From the box:
Here’s the exciting new indoor sport for people who love people. Orgy begins by choosing sides (delightful custom) and centers around the “Porron” (translation: “to pour it on”) filled with your favorite libation. Object of the game is to see which team achieves the longest trajectory for the longest time with the fewest spills. Rewards to winners are optional.
(via boing boing)
The discovery was made by crashing an empty rocket stage into a crater at the Moon’s south pole.
Malcolm Gladwell was in Akron last night and chose to talk about, among other things, the financial crisis and how it was possible that things went so wrong with so many smart people calling the shots. He wove in a narrative involving Joe Hooker and his stunning defeat to Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Chancellorsville, a battle Hooker had no business losing. His point was that overconfidence can have disastrous results, even if the odds are overwhelmingly in your favor. Other than his hair being a bit more tame than usual, it was a great evening.
Following his prepared talk, Gladwell took some questions, one of which led him to relate the story of a girls basketball team who made up for their lack of talent with an unconventional approach to the game. The full story had been published earlier this year in the New Yorker.
The opposing coaches began to get angry. There was a sense that Redwood City wasn’t playing fair—that it wasn’t right to use the full-court press against twelve-year-old girls, who were just beginning to grasp the rudiments of the game. The point of basketball, the dissenting chorus said, was to learn basketball skills. Of course, you could as easily argue that in playing the press a twelve-year-old girl learned something much more valuable—that effort can trump ability and that conventions are made to be challenged. But the coaches on the other side of Redwood City’s lopsided scores were disinclined to be so philosophical.
Enjoy.
Tintypes are photographs that are captured on pieces of metal coated with a light sensitive material (no actual tin is involved). Photographer David Sokosh uses 19th century technology, and wooden cameras that he designed and built himself, to produce his images.
A droplet of water does not immediately coalesce into a pool of water. The droplet is checked by a thin layer of air, which it must first push out of the way, causing it to bounce or rest momentarily on the surface of the water.
Some of the video is beautiful, especially at about 50 seconds in.
(via cynical-c)
AT&T’s 3G coverage earns the iPhone a spot next to Charlie-in-the-box and that polka-dotted elephant.
Wonderful collection of park maps from as far back as 1931. I have quite a few Cedar Point maps of my own that I saved from the early nineties when I would go several times a year. They’re great free souvenirs.
Also, check out the brochures, like this one from 1985.
Not beautiful, but it brings back some fond memories, and now the stupid jingle from the 1985 TV commercial is stuck in my head. Amusement parks are magic places, and Cedar Point in the summertime is the best.
(via df)
The ambient music at Walt Disney World is the result of a highly refined system put in place to correct a problem nobody ever noticed.
In the mid 1990’s, the park started researching the problem. It would eventually find no existing solution, so the engineers had to design and construct, on their own, one of the most complex and advanced audio systems ever built. The work paid off: today, as you walk through Disney World, the volume of the ambient music does not change. Ever. More than 15,000 speakers have been positioned using complex algorithms to ensure that the sound plays within a range of just a couple decibels throughout the entire park. It is quite a technical feat acoustically, electrically, and mathematically.
Incredible attention to detail to ensure that the visitor experience is as perfect as possible.
(via boing boing)
Scientists are blaming a temperature spike at the Large Hadron Collider on a piece of bread, possibly dropped by a passing bird.
The bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant over heating in parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident, but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic failsafes would have shut down the machine.
(via cynical-c)
Set of photos from Andy Ihnatko comparing image quality of iPhone and Droid cameras. Yes, the Droid has a flash and more megapixels, but the iPhone does a better job overall, at least for my money. Ihnatko’s conclusion is that even though the Droid has a 5 megapixel camera, the iPhone has better software behind the camera.
(via df)
Researchers believe that a newly opened rift in the Ethiopian desert will one day become a new ocean. The crack, 35 miles long, opened in a matter of days in 2005, set in motion by a volcanic eruption and forced apart by magma pushing up through the middle of the rift.
The African and Arabian plates meet in the remote Afar desert of Northern Ethiopia and have been spreading apart in a rifting process – at a speed of less than 1 inch per year – for the past 30 million years. This rifting formed the 186-mile Afar depression and the Red Sea. The thinking is that the Red Sea will eventually pour into the new sea in a million years or so. The new ocean would connect to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, an arm of the Arabian Sea between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia in eastern Africa.
(via kottke)
Fascinating bit of history from the early days of html, wherein Marc Andreessen proposes the use of a new tag to embed images in the text of a document.
Marc’s
<img>element didn’t mandate a common graphics format; it didn’t define how text flowed around it; it didn’t support text alternatives or fallback content for older browsers. And 16, almost 17 years later, we’re still struggling with content sniffing, and it’s still a source of crazy security vulnerabilities. And you can trace that all the way back, 17 years, through the Great Browser Wars, all the way back to February 25, 1993, when Marc Andreessen offhandedly remarked, “MIME, someday, maybe,” and then shipped his code anyway.The ones that win are the ones that ship.
(via kottke)
Franz Welser-Most, the director of the Cleveland Orchestra, is taking on a second job – director of the Vienna State Opera.
No, the incoming director of the state opera — the massive, complicated and powerful institution at Vienna’s cultural heart — is most inspired by the future, not the legendary past. When Welser-Most, 49, takes over for Seiji Ozawa next season, the only direction he’ll be looking is forward.
“What excites me is the potential of the house, not its history, great as it is. Tradition has to be something lively.”
Maybe as early as the end of this year, Netflix will bring its streaming service to the Wii. Here’s hoping we won’t have to wait for the Wii HD to be released.
Speaking of Stephen King, Goodreads has the official trailer for Under the Dome, his new novel. Since when do they make trailers for books?
The hardcover will be released on November 10, but even though it shares the same price, Scribner isn’t releasing the e-book version until the day before Christmas.
However:
Thanks to an online price war among Target.com, Amazon and Walmart.com, the hardcover for “Under the Dome,” “Going Rogue” and other popular November releases can be pre-ordered for $9 or less, a strong source of concern among publishers and independent booksellers, who cannot afford to charge so little.
Nine dollars? That’s nuts.
Jet has been trained to anticipate seizures, panic attacks and plunging blood sugar and will alert his owner to these things by staring intently at her until she does something about the problem. He will drop a toy in her lap to snap her out of a dissociative state. If she has a seizure, he will position himself so that his body is under her head to cushion a fall.
Jet seems like a genius, but is he really so smart? In fact, is any of it in his brain, or is it mostly in his sniff?
How much cognitive ability does a dog really have? There’s no clear consensus, but recent research has produced interesting results. Even if you have trouble accepting that a canine brain processes information in a way similar to a human brain, some dogs are capable of remarkable behavior.
